


Little Darling, I Feel That Ice is Slowly Melting

by kaycares



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: F/M, White Room, post 3b
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-23
Updated: 2015-06-23
Packaged: 2018-04-05 17:52:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,154
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4189305
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kaycares/pseuds/kaycares
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Or "The One Where Scott Helps Malia (While Helping Himself)"</p><p>Scott dreams about white rooms and blood stained hands. He closes his eyes and sees Allison's face while Lydia's screams ring in his ears. He wakes up gasping for breath and sweating through tangled sheets. </p><p>It's been three weeks, and sometimes, it still feels like it happened yesterday.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Little Darling, I Feel That Ice is Slowly Melting

**Author's Note:**

> With a week left until the premiere, the Teen Wolf social media has me a little underwhelmed, so I decided to join the Character Appreciation Week bandwagon with a homage to some of my favorite rarepairs. So here's some Post 3B Scott angst to start off the week. Title credit goes to The Beatles because I unfortunately own nothing.

Scott dreams of white rooms and blood stained hands. He closes his eyes and sees Allison's face while Lydia's screaming rings in his ears. He wakes up gasping for breath and sweating through tangled sheets. 

It's been three weeks, and sometimes, it still feels like it happened yesterday. 

He keeps waiting for things to level out again, to find himself standing on solid, middle ground. Instead, he barely keeps his head above the tide turning the day, and he gets sucked back in every night. Into memories of brunette curls and freezing water and the heart-stopping realization that he's too late. 

Every night now, he's too late. 

It's always that same white room. She's always in that same black dress. He can see her mouth move, and somehow he knows what she's trying to tell him is important, but he can never get close enough. He tries - god, does he ever try - but there's always an obstacle in his path: An army of oni with their swords at the ready, a kanima crouching on the ceiling, a thick line of alphas with glowing red eyes, a monster wearing a mask of his best friend's face. Every time, he tries to take down his opponent. Every time, he fails. 

Every night, it's the same dream until he starts to wonder if maybe he's just going crazy. 

\--- 

When Stiles shows up one Saturday with Malia, Scott's initial reaction is to turn them away. There's just enough of a shadow still under Stiles's eyes to pretend like he'll ever be himself again. It's the cold, hard evidence he wants to lay before Malia as a campaign for her to join any pack but his. 

He let Stiles lose control of his own mind. He let Isaac leave and never even tried to stop him. He let Allison die. Malia would probably be safer with no pack. 

But Stiles wraps an arm around his shoulders and tugs him close enough to whisper when he says, "Y'know, we kinda made that promise..." And Scott already knows they owe her this for forcing her out of her home, out of her body, out of everything she's always known. 

She's forgiven Stiles by now, but Scott catches it every time that Stiles reminds her that Scott's a friend. A good friend. Like the alpha. Like we need him. (He bites his tongue to keep from arguing all of this until his mouth tastes like metal.) And she warms up to him, mesmerized by the easy way he can pull his claws out of thin air, make his fangs appear, flash his eyes in her direction. 

"But how do I do it?" she asks a week later from the corner of Stiles's bed, legs folded beneath her and clawless hands held out in front of her as an offering. 

"You have to find a trigger, something to make you shift." 

It's when she becomes frustrated after her tenth failed attempt to locate a trigger that Stiles traces her bottom lip with his thumb while promising her they'll figure this out and then sealing it with a kiss, and Scott can feel the ghost of the powerful shift a threat on Allison's life always brought.

"Try using Stiles," he suggests, and then he watches the way she finally makes her claws appear after another long, drawn out kiss. 

He lets himself get caught up in their excitement. Because if he can't protect her, maybe he can at least teach her to protect herself. 

\--- 

He dreams the same dream for a month, and then it changes. The blood is gone from his hands, the monsters are nowhere to be found, but the walls are still white and she's still there. 

This time, he can make it halfway across the room. He doesn't know how, but he feels like there has to be a way to bring her back. He's been here twice before and lived to tell about it, so it has to be possible. And just when his heart starts to race with the anticipation of being this close to her again, he hits some kind of invisible force field and finds himself on the floor instead. 

He gets to his feet and pounds against it before trying to rip it apart with his claws. But whatever it is overpowers his alpha strength and leaves him wheezing when he finally gives up. He's close enough now to see the tears welling in the corners of her eyes, but not close enough to hear her words. 

He can only read one on her lips that she says over and over again: Help. 

\---

Malia becomes a surface-level distraction. She's the rubix cube to keep his hands busy while his mind works through more complex problems. Like how to break through that force field and how to bring Allison back with him. At night, he lives through that hell over and over again, but during the day, he tries to save Malia from the hell he helped condemn her to. 

She's a fast learner because she's driven: first, determined to learn how to be an animal again, and then equally as determined to control it so she can stay human. Scott doesn't have to hear her say it to know it's so she can stay with Stiles. 

It becomes his reason for trying to help her more. She erases the those dark circles from beneath Stiles's eyes along with the worry lines from his forehead, and Scott wants to help her learn how to control her shift so she can continue to pull Stiles away from the past. After everything his best friend has been through, Stiles deserves to be happy and then some. 

There's something about Malia that makes him feel like some part of Allison is still a part of the pack. The two girls couldn't be more different, but Malia has that same kind of easy confidence, that same determination to pick herself up and dust herself off and do better the next time. The comparisons feel more eerie when she starts wearing Allison's hand-me-downs, passed along from Lydia. 

So he keeps trying to be a better alpha for her. (He doesn't know which girl it's really for anymore.) 

Scott knows nothing about full shifts, but he shows her how to make her eyes turn blue, to transform her teeth into fangs, to use her claws against an enemy. He and Derek take turns fighting her so she can defend herself if she needs to. They're cautious on every full moon, but she hasn't started shifting yet. In the meantime, Scott constructs a plan alongside Stiles so they're ready. 

Over time, she becomes a purpose and not a distraction. 

"I don't hate you," she tells him out of the blue one afternoon when she has him pinned against the mats they put down on the floor of the loft for training like this. (They all decided they need more practice after the past year. "Not anymore, at least." 

"I'm glad," he volunteers when he's sure he heard her right, above the pounding of blood in his ears. 

"Stiles told me I should tell you that." 

Scott laughs. And for the first time in a while, he doesn't feel guilty for feeling happy. 

\---

"Do you ever dream about it?"he asks Stiles one afternoon when Malia is with her tutor. "About the room?" 

His dream is stuck in a second purgatory now, left unchanged. Every night, he tries something new against that force field, and every night, he wakes up with her distraught face branded on his mind. Twice now, he's clawed through his pillow before he wakes up, another two times once he's awake. Something has to change. 

Stiles nods, staring at the wall in front of him. "Yeah. Used to." 

Scott swallows hard, wrestling with the next question he knows he has to ask. "Was she there?" he asks when two minutes pass and Stiles doesn't say anything else. 

"Sometimes." 

His hands form fists tight enough for his dull, human nails to dig into his palms as he fights against his undying need to ask. He probably would ask if he could decide if he wanted to escape this prison or keep this piece of her alive. Stiles, though, never gives him a chance to decide. 

"For a while, it was - Like, I just couldn't get to her. But then she told me it was okay. Like it wasn't my fault." Stiles stops to look down at his shoes, and Scott's throat feels tight in sympathy. "She told me to take care of you, too," he adds after he clears his throat. "It was... good." 

That night, Scott falls asleep envisioning her voice and welcoming the feeling of a clear conscious. But he wakes up to claws puncturing his pillow and frustrated tears drying on his cheeks instead. 

\--- 

Malia finally shifts a few weeks later. Scott is there in the basement of Lydia's lake house, watching the tender way Stiles clasps the leather bands of the cuffs around her wrists, and he can almost feel another girl's lips against his as she leans down into the cavern of a freezer. He only pulls Stiles farther back an hour later because he knows Malia already knows the guilt of hurting someone you love. 

He knows it, but he forgets in the storm of his own grief until she reaches under his bed to retrieve a kicked shoe and comes up with Allison's sweatshirt instead. 

Stiles has been working with her on reading other people's emotions, so he's not surprised when she tells him he's sad. He feels like he should try to describe this hollow feeling that is somehow also filling him as he takes in the scent that lingers in the fabric, but he can't find the words. 

"It's like a hole," she says instead as she drops down onto his bed beside him, and Scott looks up, startled. "Right here," she clarifies with a hand held over the middle of her chest. "It's how Stiles feels when he thinks about his mom. It's how I feel when I think about my family." 

"It's a huge hole," he agrees because he doesn't know what else to say to her now that she has her guard down. 

"Stiles says it gets smaller. We just have to wait." 

He doesn't know if he wants it to get smaller, but he knows he wants to help her. For the first time, he feels like he can help her with this because he knows how grief feels. 

He takes her hand as a silent promise to see her through to the other side. 

\--- 

That night, he dreams of a white room and a familiar girl. He doesn't dream of invisible walls or defeated enemies. There's just her, waiting for him in the center of the room. She feels too real when he pulls her into his arms, and he somehow already knows he can't keep her. 

"It's okay," she tells him, her breath warm against his neck. "I'm okay." 

His eyes are filled with the thousands of questions he's been waiting to ask when he pulls back just enough to look at her. "But you were asking for help," he says instead. 

She shakes her head, a soft smile on her lips as she pressed a palm to his cheek. "To help her. You needed something to make you feel strong again, and Stiles needed something good. I wanted you to help Malia." 

He can feel the ghost of her lips against his again as he remembers sitting in that old freezer, the feeling of his hand around his in the woods when he watched Malia steal kisses to help her shift, her voice in his mind as he taught Malia how to defend herself. He's punished himself with this vision of her locked away in this room, placated himself with grand visions of how to free her when she was with them - with him - instead.

There's a peace that comes in knowing they're both free of this place. 

"You can't stay," she tells him gently when he's held her for what feels like only five minutes. Her hands find his at his waist and gently uncurl his fingers from the fabric of her dress. "It's not right - not now. The pack needs you. But I'll be here." 

She smiles again as she says it, and he holds tightly onto the knowledge that she'll be waiting. 

\--- 

He wakes up feeling rested for the first time since he felt her take his last breath in his arms with tears of a different kind drying on his pillow. His stubbled cheek feels warm to the touch, and her voice still fills his mind, reminding him that it's okay to move on. 

The next night, he doesn't dream. He can almost hear her voice, telling him he's okay, too.


End file.
